Unofficial news and tips about Google

November 1, 2012

Gmail Smart Label for Social Updates

Gmail has a new smart label that groups messages received from social networks, blogs and more, so you don't have to create complicated filters. You'll find messages from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogger, Quora and other social sites.

Smart Labels is a Gmail Labs feature, so it's not enabled by default, it's still an experiment and it "may change, break or disappear at any time". "Smart Labels help you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such," explains Google.

Excellent feature. This was definitely needed, actually lot of people have already created custom label and filter to organize such emails.

Good to see Google understanding customer needs and customizing products as per that. This is small but an important lesson for us - entrepreneurs/app-preneurs/wantrepreneurs - out of this new feature.

I can't edit the filter. There is a bug. I had to create another filter to just remove the emails from inbox. Annoying.

So why remove them from inbox? Because there are just plain notifications. I don't care if someone tagged me on Facebook. I'll see it the next time i log in there. I like to keep my inbox notification free.

Smart Labels are a great feature, and one on which I've become dependent to keep my inbox sane. But we absolutely need a way to customize the actions (and names) attached to them. For example, I'd like Social Updates kept out of my inbox. In fact, I had this working prior to this latest change, but now it's broken and those emails are bleeding back into my inbox, with no apparent way to fix it. That really, really sucks. Please fix this.